11-15-00

Hail,

Okay, today's Rambling is going to be fairly short. "Legends of the Mall" was one of those almost totally substanceless filler episodes I so dislike. There's been quite a lot of filler in the last two seasons, and that doesn't give me any high hopes for fifth season. This one wasn't even particularly funny, and most of that humor was provided by Trent.

What more can I say about this? People were mostly in-character outside the stories, but that was so little a part of the show that it's pretty irrelevant. The stories themselves were fairly mediocre bits of folk hokum, the kind of insipid tales told around Boy Scout and Girl Scout campfires. It was all topped off by a predictable but very unfortunate ending that ruined this episode's chance of staying in the "slightly amusing but pointless" category and dropped into the "not funny enough to be ludicrous" category.
The best description I can think of for this episode is one Terry Pratchett uses to describe Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler's sausages in a bun. He describes how Dibbler had managed to find a sausage that, regardless of how much mustard, onions, relish, etc were put on it, tasted of absolutely nothing. They were like biting into an inflated balloon.

I'm still missing author credits for everything after Psycho Therapy or so, so I don't know who wrote this one, but I've got my suspicions.
And everyone should thank me for resisting the temptation to make strained carrots comparisons.

Wraith